Falk eBook

“German I should think,” muttered one.
“The skipper has his wife on board,” remarked
another; and the light of the crimson sunset all ablaze
behind the London smoke, throwing a glow of Bengal
light upon the barque’s spars, faded away from
the Hope Reach.

Then one of us, who had not spoken before, a man of
over fifty, that had commanded ships for a quarter
of a century, looking after the barque now gliding
far away, all black on the lustre of the river, said:

This reminds me of an absurd episode in my life, now
many years ago, when I got first the command of an
iron barque, loading then in a certain Eastern seaport.
It was also the capital of an Eastern kingdom, lying
up a river as might be London lies up this old Thames
of ours. No more need be said of the place; for
this sort of thing might have happened anywhere where
there are ships, skippers, tugboats, and orphan nieces
of indescribable splendour. And the absurdity
of the episode concerns only me, my enemy Falk, and
my friend Hermann.

There seemed to be something like peculiar emphasis
on the words “My friend Hermann,” which
caused one of us (for we had just been speaking of
heroism at sea) to say idly and nonchalantly:

“And was this Hermann a hero?”

Not at all, said our grizzled friend. No hero
at all. He was a Schiff-fuhrer: Ship-conductor.
That’s how they call a Master Mariner in Germany.
I prefer our way. The alliteration is good, and
there is something in the nomenclature that gives
to us as a body the sense of corporate existence:
Apprentice, Mate, Master, in the ancient and honourable
craft of the sea. As to my friend Hermann, he
might have been a consummate master of the honourable
craft, but he was called officially Schiff-fuhrer,
and had the simple, heavy appearance of a well-to-do
farmer, combined with the good-natured shrewdness of
a small shopkeeper. With his shaven chin, round
limbs, and heavy eyelids he did not look like a toiler,
and even less like an adventurer of the sea.
Still, he toiled upon the seas, in his own way, much
as a shopkeeper works behind his counter. And
his ship was the means by which he maintained his
growing family.

She was a heavy, strong, blunt-bowed affair, awakening
the ideas of primitive solidity, like the wooden plough
of our forefathers. And there were, about her,
other suggestions of a rustic and homely nature.
The extraordinary timber projections which I have
seen in no other vessel made her square stern resemble
the tail end of a miller’s waggon. But
the four stern ports of her cabin, glazed with six
little greenish panes each, and framed in wooden sashes
painted brown, might have been the windows of a cottage
in the country. The tiny white curtains and the
greenery of flower pots behind the glass completed
the resemblance. On one or two occasions when
passing under stern I had detected from my boat a
round arm in the act of tilting a watering pot, and
the bowed sleek head of a maiden whom I shall always
call Hermann’s niece, because as a matter of
fact I’ve never heard her name, for all my intimacy
with the family.